Description

Life & Death is a game which casts you as a doctor in a hospital. Your job is to diagnose patients and administer appropriate therapies, or even perform surgery when necessary.

To diagnose a patient, you have to press on his or her abdomen, to see which portions of the stomach cause pain. Basing on this knowledge, you can choose a therapy for him (observation, medication or referring to another specialist) or administer a X-Ray or ultrasound scan to get more information about his illness.

In some cases, surgery will be necessary. You're the surgeon and you have to perform the operation very carefully, adhering strictly to the procedures, preserving hygiene, and maintaining care when cutting up the patient.

Should you mistakenly administer the wrong therapy, or kill your patient at the operating table, you're kicked into the medical school, where you're given hints as to what you've done wrong.

Forums

Trivia

Cover art

Game Package

The game came with extremely realistic materials. It included an internal memo and pathology course, both typed with a dactylo, photocopied and then stapled by hand. And if you looked under the bottom cardboard in the box, you could find a real pair of surgical gloves and a surgery mask!

References to the Game

At the end of the fourth episode in the anime about otaku lifestyle Genshiken (1st season, 2004), when Saki asks her boyfriend Kousaka "What was your first time like?", he misunderstands the question and, being an otaku, starts naming the first anime series and games he tried. Among the games he first played, Life & Death is mentioned, alongside Ultima (without specifying which one) and The Manhole. Regarding Life & Death Kousaka adds: "I don't even know how many people I killed in that". Usually however, both in the anime and the original manga, all the titles of popular entertainment products are altered to avoid copyright problems (e.g. The Chanp of Fighters 95 instead of The King of Fighters '95, Berserker instead of the popular manga Berserk). Other notable exceptions to this are the Puyo Puyo and Guilty Gear game series.

Simulation

The simulation is actually quite strict: Deviate a hair too much from the proper incision technique, and you'll find your license revoked or your physician alter-ego kicked back to medical school. This was done intentionally to emphasize the importance of the topic.

Sound

This game had a few digital sounds that came out of the PC Speaker, which was quite uncommon back then, and led to compatibility problems on certain machines.

Awards

ST Format

1992 (Issue #5) - #4 Most Weird and Stupid Plots of All Time (Atari ST games) (Comment: "Thankfully, the game only includes those two operations, otherwise SD would be somewhere in the 700s. But where's Life and Death 2: The Brain? Think of the possibilities.")